ACCUDEMIA USER SPOTLIGHT
Carol Kreuger from Hardin-Simmons University joined us for our recent Accudemia User Spotlight to talk about her institution’s experience using Accudemia. Watch Carol’s full presentation here, or read on to learn the highlights!
Benefits for Multiple Parties
HSU, a private university in Texas, has just under 1700 students. Carol is the Director of the Academic Center for Enrichment, which offers tutoring and writing assistance for students. The center is CRLA certified and relies on Accudemia data to make sure they are keeping up with their certification requirements.
Carol discussed other ways Accudemia benefits both the center and the institution as a whole:
- They have found collecting accessible data improves student retention efforts.
- It allows them to see student engagement data in terms of available resources.
- The data helps Carol make and support budget decisions for her center for things such as how many tutors and hours they need.
- It allows them to get a historical picture of their center’s growth and impact over time.
She also outlined several ways the use of Accudemia benefits the center’s tutors:
- It provides record-keeping for their certifications, which benefits them professionally.
- It allows them to access and view logs from previous sessions, equipping them to better assist students.
- By having to document their sessions within Accudemia, they gain experience that can be directly applied to many other jobs.
There are additional benefits for students that Carol has noticed from using Accudemia, beyond the assistance that the ACE provides:
- By allowing staff to efficiently log notes on a session, more time is freed up that can be spent working directly with students.
- The students’ professors and athletic coaches (when applicable) receive timely and accurate documentation about their activity, which is required for some students.
- By receiving notes on their session, students are given a roadmap to improve their work and encouraged to return for assistance.
Data: What They Collect and How They Use It
There are many options for collecting data in Accudemia, some of which are more beneficial depending on the specific needs and circumstances of each center. For example, the ACE does not offer appointments to students, so collecting and reviewing appointment data within Accudemia would not be useful for them. Here are the types of data that the ACE has found most useful for them to collect:
- Semester comparisons: This allows them to see the number of students the center assisted from term to term. With factoring in things like COVID, they can see a clear increase in traffic each fall term which slows down for the subsequent spring and summer semesters, allowing them to plan their staffing and hours accordingly.
- Day of the week comparisons: By looking at trends across days of the week, Carol can see a clear increase in traffic on Mondays and Tuesdays, with visits dropping off for the remainder of the week. Again, this allows her to proactively schedule tutors during days and times when students are most likely to request assistance.
- Subject comparisons: This allows Carol to see which types of subjects students most often seek assistance with, so she can target her recruiting and hiring efforts appropriately. Additionally, if Carol sees a subject that students are not seeking help with, this doesn’t necessarily mean the students don’t need help, so in these circumstances, Carol will bring this information to professors of these underutilized subjects to encourage them to promote the ACE to their students. As a result, professors actually “compete” with each other to get the most number of students to seek help from the ACE.
- Student return times: This shows the number of times students return for help and like many centers, Carol was disappointed to learn that the majority of students who do come to the ACE only do so one time over a semester. In response, they have offered several incentives to students to encourage them to visit multiple times, such as drawings for prizes.
Thank you again to Carol for presenting during our Accudemia User Spotlight! Again, you can watch her full presentation here to learn more about how her area benefits from using Accudemia.
Join us next time
Engineerica Systems is pleased to present our Accudemia User Spotlight segment recap for 9/13/2022 for our Accudemia sessions. We hope that these questions help you to ponder how you might utilize Accudemia and other innovations in your center. Check the page about our Monthly Accudemia Session to find out more about our next session and for more ideas about helping our students achieve success!
